> And most clients default to whatever is
> the character encoding of the platform they're running on. If you
> run Mosaic on Russian Windows, it defaults to Microsoft's version of
> a cyrillic code page, without even the possibility of displaying
> ISO-8859-1. This is current practice.
Not true. It just displays text with configured fonts. I can display
iso-8859-1 after manual reconfiguration of fonts. There are browsers
which can switch fonts automagically (Alis among them). But most of
browsers (Macintosh ones are exception) did not translate incoming
documents/outgoing form data from "native" encoding to network one.
Even does not provide charset information for server. That is why
enforced to use User-Agent by servers in attempt to guess browser
native encoding.